Don’t let Extinction Rebellion’s antics wreck our fragile economy – Bernard Ingham

We are not facing global extinction and Britain is just about the last place on Earth to mount a rebellion against it.

I fully accept that we are having the mildest run of winters in my lifetime, if you ignore the odd tame “beast from the east”.

Otherwise, I have not noticed much change in our weather since I was a lad. Heatwaves, droughts, floods, gales and storms have regularly come and gone, and will continue to do so.

It may well be that the climate is changing. But what’s new? The Vikings were able to colonise Greenland a thousand years ago without much help from the carbon dioxide produced over the last 250 years by the industrial revolution.

Have these rebels never heard of the 500-year climate cycle identified by German scientists?

I agree there is a very good reason to clean up our atmosphere (and environment) in the interests of public health.

Indeed, in terms of extinction – i.e. the deaths it is reputed to cause – pollution is a far more urgent reason for action than climate change.

In any case, you will find it hard to discover a government that is more pledged to eliminate fossil fuels and CO2 than the British.

Administrations of different political hues have been so hard at it for the last 30 years that all semblance of a rational energy policy has disappeared up the spout.

It is utterly naïve to believe that we 
can power a competitive modern economy on land – and seascape – by destructive wind, waves, tides, water or solar power.

Yet we have recently lost our last coalmine, and other fossil fuels – oil and gas, if not illogically the wood burned at Drax – are on their way out.

To put the tin hat on it, we are also losing nuclear power stations – generating reliable and largely CO2-free power – while, at the same time, interminably building the huge, untried version at Hinkley Point in Somerset. There is only one end to this: regular power cuts.

And, if you add it all up, there is only one conclusion to be drawn: Extinction Rebellion, with its antics over the past few days, is conniving at a wrecked economy in the very week that the Covid authorities are trying to get everybody back to school, office and factory.

It reminds me of the theatre of the absurd.

I simply cannot believe that Extinction Rebellion, stuffed with comfortably off middle-class warriors, believes returning the planet to a peasant society, which is the logic of its position, is practical politics.

The kindest thing to say about them is that they are blind to the consequences of their actions.

They are also abusing the blessed freedom in our democracy to demonstrate peacefully in support of a cause, however misguided.

If the Government is serious about a return to school and work, it ought to be thinking of immediately enacting a law that forbids all interference with the right of citizens to move freely on roads and footpaths in pursuit of their lawful business.

People should be free to demonstrate as much as they like but in a designated place such as Hyde Park Corner.

If every town provided a ranting field, more police time would be spent catching hardened criminals.

With a national debt exceeding £2 trillion (thousand billion) – more than the total value of a year’s normal economic output – a mammoth budget deficit from coronavirus of around £300bn and rising unemployment, we need to concentrate on economic recovery.

I would even go so far as to argue that action on climate change should be temporarily set aside, though not forgotten.

Otherwise, Extinction Rebellion really will see the end of one of the world’s largest economies, quite incapable of guaranteeing its security against the predators of this world – to wit China, Russia and Iran.

In short, we need a growing, not a contracting economy, to ensure that Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

This is not to be alarmist. This is a time for alarm with the United States in electoral turmoil in danger of returning an egomaniac in Donald Trump; Europe in an utter mess of its own federalist making; and an error-prone British government trying to hold a post-Brexit UK together.

We need least of all extremists such as Extinction Rebellion posturing pointlessly across our towns and cities, flaunting their virtue and, if they did but know it, their utter national irrelevance.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson